The Peril Of Self-Occupation

In a word, it is this: not judgment, but capacity as the Lord's objective in His dealings with His own through suffering.
Have you got that?

Not judgment, but capacity, the enlargement of capacity for God, the things of God, for spiritual, Divine things.

That is what God is working at in His people through suffering, delivering from that limitation which is always present when self in any form has a place. 

Oh, I do hope that you see this, that when the Lord takes one of His own redeemed and justified ones in hand with His own beneficent intention of bringing them through to enlarged capacity...

The infinite peril which is always right near at hand is that Satan should make us more self-occupied by our sufferings than we were before. 

There is nothing more calculated, or as calculated, to make us self-occupied as suffering.

It is a great thing to find a suffering saint not taken up with themselves. 

Many years ago a servant of God (well-known all over the world) and I were speaking at a convention in Wales.

He was a man who was regarded by everybody to be more than half dead.

No one would have taken out an insurance policy on his life.

His heart was supposed to be gone and I knew this.

I met him on the way to the meeting and said to him, "How are you today?"

"Oh", he said, quite brightly and cheerfully, "I don't matter at all!"...

And yet I knew exactly how he was and what an effort it was for him to get to that meeting. 

But here was a wonderful detachment from himself, "I don't matter at all!"

This impressed me, as you see; it was many years ago.

This brother lived until last year, I believe carried on by a Life not his own.

But I am saying that the great peril under suffering and in trial, not necessarily physical, but any kind of suffering in the ways of God, is to be more self-occupied...

And let us remember...that is exactly what Satan is after.

Instead of being occupied with what the Lord is after, we become occupied, engrossed, with ourselves, because of what the Lord is doing with us and how He is doing it - the difficulty and the suffering...

Just living in our own little world which becomes a very miserable little world for ourselves and for everyone else.

I know the difficulty here and I know the battle of this matter.

But what I feel the Lord wants me to say to you and to myself is this:

That you and I can never be delivered from Satan in this matter until we get focused upon what the Lord is after and not upon what we are going through...

Or upon any suggestion of Satan that the Lord is dealing with us as He deals with ungodly people in judgment. 

No, not at all!

You see, there is this heavenly side.

Satan is in this matter.

Satan is making a terrific assault.

What is the ground of Satan's strength?

What, after all, proves to be the ground of Satan's strength in Job's life?

Why, it is Job falling into the trap of self-justification, self-vindication.

He fell into Satan's trap, and, poor fellow, he wallowed in that mire for a long time.

He fell right in.

Oh, may the Lord deliver us from that slough into which we can fall and wallow...

Satan's trap for us that, when the Lord brings us into trial and suffering, whatever it may be, that it is because the Lord has a controversy with us and is against us...

When all the time what the Lord is after is not lessening, narrowing and curtailing, but capacity.

If you and I would take hold of our adversities and our afflictions and say before the Lord, "The Lord's intention in this is that I shall have enlarged spiritual capacity, the end of this is going to be greater usefulness and value to the Lord!"

If we keep on that line, we shall be delivered from the devil.

Satan's power over us would be so largely broken...

For Satan's strength with Job was not in Satan's ability to afflict, but it was on the ground of Job's occupation with himself under discipline.

Have you got the significance of this? 
I am not saying that the Lord never does judge His own people.

There are sins into which the people of God may fall such as the sinner in the Corinthian assembly...

And God does judge in the matter of specific iniquity even His own children - not unto destruction, even so. 

Delivered unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved" (1 Cor. 5:5); not unto final destruction but unto salvation. 

But we are not speaking of the specific case of the Divine judgment of the child of God.

We are speaking of the general case of so many of His people being brought into affliction and trial and being emptied out.

What for?

To be all the more filled.

Keep your eye focused upon this.

You have seen the end of the Lord - keep your eye on that, the end of the Lord, what the Lord is after...enlargement.

That will certainly be the outcome of every Divine work in His own people along the line of suffering.

You can resolve this meditation into just this one thing - the end of the Lord is not destruction or judgment, but capacity, enlargement, fulness...

And of course, going with that, is being brought into a place where Satan's power can no longer operate.

~T. Austin Sparks~